THE WAR'S NOT OVER YET IN VIETNAM, THE MAGAZINE

KENTON ROBINSON;Courant Staff WriterTHE HARTFORD COURANT

On a sunny Sunday afternoon 30 years ago today, three torpedo boats attacked the destroyer USS Maddox off the coast of North Vietnam.

The Maddox, which had entered the Gulf of Tonkin to spy on the North Vietnamese, escaped unscathed. But the skirmish -- and a second, spurious incident reported two days later -- gave President Johnson all the excuse he needed to lead us into our most unpopular war.

By the time the last American troops withdrew on March 29, 1973, the war had cost about 58,000 American lives, had torn the American commonwealth asunder and had left a litter of unanswered questions in its wake: How did this happen? Why did we lose? What does this mean?

The war did not end with the withdrawal of American troops. There was still the need to answer those questions, and to be reconciled to the loss. And so, even today, more than 20 years later, the battles are still being fought . . . on the pages of Vietnam magazine.

"Go in-country six times a year to meet the enemy in the bush, villages, and rice paddies," reads Vietnam's advertising copy. "Exciting feature articles will take you up against Charlie on his home turf."

To the extent that this copy suggests this is a magazine for veterans who can't leave the war behind them, it is misleading.

True, Vietnam is a glossy, full- color bimonthly publication that carries advertisements for everything from commemorative AK-47s to T-shirts emblazoned with President "Taco Bill" Clinton kissing a Vietnamese Communist's behind.

And true, some of the articles take a definite political stance. The August issue now on the newsstands, for example, includes an essay by retired Air Force Col. Jacksel M. Broughton, who argues that the way we fought the air war in the Persian Gulf highlights the mistakes we made in 'Nam.

But for the most part, the magazine is a work of military history, focusing on the strategy, tactics, armament and battles of the Vietnam War, and written by veterans of the conflict and scholars who have studied it.

For example, the August issue also includes two exquisitely detailed minute-by-minute accounts of actions in the war. Retired Army Brig. Gen. James E. Shelton recounts the battle of Ong Thanh, and Army Reserve Lt. Col. James T. Root Jr. writes about the 1st Battalion, 12th Cavalry's victory over the North Vietnamese Army's 7th and 8th battalions, 18th Regiment, at Hoa Hoi.

The real soldier

"We decided we wanted to tell the story," says Kenneth Phillips, the founding managing editor of Vietnam and now director of special projects for the Cowles History Group, which publishes Vietnam and nearly a dozen other historical magazines about everything from the Civil War to the Wild West.

"We didn't want to tell the politics of Vietnam," he says. "We didn't want to tell the whys and why nots. We wanted to tell the combative aspects of the Vietnam war, what our soldiers went through, who won which battles, that type of thing."

That doesn't mean the magazine skirts the more painful issues. It has carried stories on My Lai, the Tet offensive, dissenters and both sides of the POW-MIA debate.

"Our ambition is to show the war in all its complexity," says retired Army Col. Harry G. Summers Jr., the magazine's editor.

The magazine was launched in the summer of 1988, a time, Phillips says, when "the anxieties, the disappointments, all the bad things about Vietnam had kind of died down."

It was an immediate success. Within a year, the demand was such that the magazine went from four to six issues a year, and at its peak circulation went to a high of 190,000. Circulation has since leveled off but has stayed strong at about 160,000.

And where initially the greatest interest had come from veterans, the magazine's base of subscribers has grown to include all sorts of other people, including academics and, most recently, young people.

"The kids now who are in their late teens, early 20s, their fathers, grandfathers fought the Vietnam War," Phillips says. "So they have a personal interest in it."

Subscribers are generally not veterans obsessed with their past, he says.

"The real soldier in Vietnam came back like most soldiers and put on his work clothes and went back to work, and he's the lawyer and he's the doctor and he's this, this, this and this," Phillips says. "He's not the guy that's still complaining about the war and saying, `I can't get my life back together.' That's not a strong majority of our readership."

"We try to hit the middle ground," Summers says. The magazine is "not a scholarly magazine which is so dense as to be unreadable," nor is it a " `Soldier of Fortune' bang-bang shoot-'em-up. We try to avoid first- person accounts, though every once in a while we'll have one in there, but we'd rather have more dispassionate accounts that explain what happened, why and all the rest."

Summers says the magazine is putting the war into perspective, something that Summers himself has a lot of. He's a veteran of Korea and Vietnam. He was one of the last men off the U.S. embassy roof when Saigon fell to the Communists in 1975. He has also written a number of books, including `On Strategy: A Critical Analysis of the Vietnam War.'

"One of the characteristics of the Vietnam generation is the lack of historical perspective," he says. "I mean the baby boomer is sort of like the Christmas goose: They wake up in a new world every morning and think that the world began with them.

"We try to give some perspective to the Vietnam experience, because in my own view that's what the Vietnam vet needs more than anything else."

`I want to apologize'

Phillips puts it another way: Vietnam magazine is about healing.

Once people understand what American soldiers went through in Vietnam, he says, they see them in a different light.

"We had a woman call in here who wanted us to publish a letter of hers. Now this has happened more times than once, but this one particular woman I'll never forget. She said, `Back in the '60s I was one of those people who spit on the soldier that came back and called him a baby killer and a murderer. But after reading your magazine and seeing what he went through, I want to apologize to the soldier.' "

And the magazine, Phillips says, is a long-overdue tribute to that soldier.

"The average Vietnam soldier went over there for one reason and one reason only. He went over there because of Mom and apple pie, the whole nine yards, you know what I mean? Because he loved his country and he believed that his country was sending him over there for a reason, and that was to win a war. And he came back and did not receive the recognition he should have.

"The Vietnam War will go down in history as a loss, but I can tell you one thing, this boy doesn't think that the Vietnam soldier lost the war."